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The War Against the Machines
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that men can’t multitask.
On Monday evening I was in the Bute, alternately dodging the pub quiz, nursing a pint, updating my operating system and working on a new book (no – not one I’ve written, but somebody else’s) when my Netbook started bleeping. I hate it when that happens, because it usually means that your computer is calling for help. Believe me when I tell you that the very last thing I need is to rely solely on Aberdare Library for Internet access. Understandably, there was a slight air of panic at my table.
A chap sitting across the bar from me said, ‘Someone’s calling you on Facebook.’
I didn’t have a headset with me, and I probably wouldn’t have plugged it into the Line Out socket. Then again, it would have drowned out the sound of twenty-five Sport questions. Memo to self: buy a headset. Also, give Rob a call back when you get chance.
As the Bard didn’t quite say: Some are born techie, some achieve techieness, and others have tech thrust upon them.
I had a Sinclair ZX81 when I was fifteen years old. (That was the model before the ZX Spectrum, but it was still pretty much when people my age first had a ‘home computer’.) I can see it now: a square slab of black plastic with a ‘touch sensitive’ keypad. The basic model had an incredible 1 kB of RAM. You could, if you saved your pocket money until Easter, send off to the Sinclair company in Scotland for a 16 kB add-on RAM pack. If your parents were doctors, or something equally wealthy, you could take the RAM all the way up to an unimaginable 64 kB!
But that was just the hardware …
Suppose you wanted to run anything more advanced than very basic graphics. First, you had to copy out pages and pages of code (except we used to call it ‘program’) from one of the many hobby mags on sale. Then you had to save everything you’d typed onto a magnetic tape in a cassette recorder, wired to the computer via a 5-pin to 5-pin DIN cable. Last of all, you’d hope the entire data transfer was completed before Mam wanted to watch Crossroads, because you’d have to unplug the computer from the coax socket on the TV, plug the aerial back in, and retune the telly to ITV.
Then your program wouldn’t run because you’d mistyped a character in line 1030.
You try telling young people that – they won’t believe yer!
In his novel Pattern Recognition William Gibson points out that the reason so many great software developers came out of the UK at the same time is precisely because they’d all been through this kerfuffle every time they wanted to play Pong. They’d learned programming the hard way. An old mate of mine – a year or two below me in school – went the distance: O levels; A levels; a degree; postgrad study; MSCA; MCSE; working with blue chip companies around the world. He was commanding his own six-figure salary and riding a Ducati in his mid-thirties.
By the time he hit forty, he was pretty much burnt out. The last time we spoke, we were equally pissed after his dad’s funeral. He’d packed in the IT game entirely and was living in Cheltenham. He got up at the crack of dawn five days a week, rode a sit-on road sweeper through the town in the mornings, and then went to the pub or the library, depending on his mood.
His mother’s neighbour had bought a PC, and had no idea how to put it all together. My mate went round to the house, plugged the green plug into the green socket, the purple plug into the purple socket, the blue plug into the blue socket, switched it on, and trousered fifty notes. I expect the neighbour would have paid twice that if the team from PC World had been called out instead.
Anyway, I decided not to pursue computing beyond those humble beginnings. My younger schoolfriends had been born techie. I had tech thrust upon me when I started work. I was using an Apple Mac thirty years ago, believe it or not. When Microsoft ‘invented’ Windows and turned everyone’s world upside down, I was able to smile smugly and tell them that Windows was for WIMPs. Literally.
I wrote a very simple stock database when I worked in Blackwells. When I worked in Dillons, I was the go-to guy for Tech Support, especially at weekends when the real helpdesk people weren’t in work. I once presented my manager with an invoice for a Sunday morning support call. He paid me in beer instead. Result!
I was an early volunteer to fight in the War Against the Machines. It’s never going to turn out like the war in the Terminator or Matrix films, though. The real war is more like a series of brief guerrilla skirmishes into enemy territory than an all-out conflict. Here’s what actually happens – a despatch from an embedded reporter near the front line, if you like.
Computer says ‘no’. We say ‘Yes, you will, you useless piece of shit!’ and then find a workaround online, or by chatting to our superior officers (people like my aforementioned mates). But there are also skilful saboteurs who go in undercover and cause havoc behind enemy lines.
I do have form in this regard. It once took three people – my GP, one of the admin staff in the surgery, and me – to persuade a prescription to come off the printer. My GP thought it was embarrassing.
I said, ‘Blame me. I can take down a printer at thirty paces just by thinking about it.’
Here’s your new word for the day: WAYZGOOSE. It’s a late medieval word meaning ‘a day on which a printer did not work’. All around the world, millions of people are celebrating a wayzgoose even as you read this.
A while ago I surpassed myself. We were in the Glandover for karaoke on a Saturday evening. Lindsey’s system – which had never played up before – completely died when I was halfway through ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’. By the time she got everything going again, we were in the long sax break that leads to the fade.
Karaoke gear seems to hate me with a red passion anyway. I don’t know which of us was responsible for almost killing Barrie’s setup before Xmas. I was there, though, so it could have been me. It’s taken us a while to pluck up the courage to try again.
Thursday night was Lindsey’s birthday. It seemed like the ideal excuse to relaunch Thursday karaoke in Jac’s. The scene in the rest of town seems to be pretty poor and declining fast. On the other hand, our equipment is better than anything you’ll encounter anywhere else. And I know most of the Broken Key Karaoke Society, so it was easy for Lindsey and me to put the word around.
It was good to see that most of the regular gang had heard about the occasion.We had a nice crowd gathered when Barrie fired up his gear and started the evening off. Lindsey and a couple of her friends got up and really impressed us all. Then it was my turn.
Halfway through ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, the monitor died for no good reason. I looked across at Barrie and saw that his laptop was displaying a shutdown error message. (Windows 10, see – Microsoft’s latest, most stable, best ever operating system.) Barrie started unplugging and reconnecting cables to try and identify the fault. People started getting pissed off (understandably), and it seemed as though the evening would end in disaster. It took us a good twenty minutes to sort out a replacement monitor, reboot everything, and pick up where we left off.
Which was me, singing ‘Coming Back to Life’ by Pink Floyd. The opening line is ‘Where were you, when I was burned and broken?’ I looked round and saw Barrie sitting on the edge of the stage, head in hands, realising that I’d found the perfect song for the occasion.
Call me Neo.
